If outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s testimony on
the Benghazi attack is to be believed, President Obama abandoned his post as
Commander-in-Chief, even as the lives of ambassador Chris Stevens and several
others hung in the balance.

Panetta met with Obama and Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, around 5 o’clock on the day of the attack, which
would continue until about seven hours later.He says the president told the two of them, “to do everything we needed
to do to try to protect lives there,” and that they received no further
communications from him for the rest of the day.Obama is known to have spoken with Israeli
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for an hour that night, but other than that,
nobody seems to know where he was or what he was doing while the crisis in
Libya was unfolding.

This illustration of Obama’s neglecting his military duties
raises questions about the recently leaked Justice Department “white paper”
setting the administration’s policy on drone strikes.Although the white paper has been the subject
of outrage, it is for the most part unremarkable.Its main purpose is to establish that the
legal authority for the strikes comes from the declaration of war (sorry –
“authorization for use of military force”) against al-Qaeda that Congress
passed in 2001.(You know, the
one that Ron Paul voted for.Look it
up.)

The
peculiar part is that a declaration of war authorizes the president to act,
whereas the white paper finds a drone strike lawful if “an informed, high-level
official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual
poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.”Furthermore, it explains that the word
“imminent” in this clause does not literally mean “imminent,” but instead is a
murky concept that is more broadly and subjectively defined.

In keeping with the declaration, it ought to be the president
who, having informed himself, makes that determination.In fact, last May, the administration planted
a story in the New York Times that
presented Obama as an omnipotent figure, who determines the fate of terror
suspects by deciding which ones are placed on a drone “kill list.”So why has Obama’s own Justice Department
assigned that responsibility to unspecified individuals farther down the chain
of command?Perhaps he has appointed an
Imminence Czar to make such decisions in his stead.

Obama tried to portray himself as being in total control of
the bin Laden raid, also, but he couldn’t even pull off a convincing publicity
photo.The picture that the White House
released depicted the president as the one person least likely to have been in
charge. Observing from the periphery,
while dressed in a golf shirt and a Nike windbreaker, he looked as if he’d been
brought there for Take Your Child to Work Day.

There’s
no such photographic evidence of his presence during the Benghazi attack, of
course.Whenever there’s nothing to take
credit for, the president remains as invisible as a shovel-ready job.

If there was any reason to doubt Panetta’s testimony, it
should have been dispelled five days later, when Obama paraphrased him during
his State of the Union Address.“As long
as I’m Commander-in-Chief, we will do whatever we must to protect those who
serve their country abroad.”How
interesting that he shifted from a singular to a plural pronoun mid-sentence.

You may remember that he performed a similar grammatical
evasion last month, when he was asked directly whether he had any personal
experience with firearms.“Yes,” he
said.“In fact, up at Camp David, we do
skeet shooting all the time.”His answer
to a follow-up question revealed, however, that he was referring to guests who
do the shooting, and that the “we” he’d mentioned didn’t necessarily include
himself.In the context of his “do
everything we need to do” order regarding Benghazi, it is clear that the “we”
from his address means the same thing.

That Obama would hand off these responsibilities as if he
were giving his car keys to a valet is only consistent with his dismissive
attitude toward attacks against America, from his categorizing the Benghazi
killings as “bumps in the road,” to his cold estimation that we could “absorb”
another 9-11 attack, to his reducing the Fort Hood massacre to just another
talking point in an otherwise lighthearted monologue.How many more examples do we need before
we're willing to draw the obvious conclusion that he simply doesn’t give a damn?